Cranleigh Councillors Slashed from Waverley Planning Committee

Cranleigh Councillors Slashed from Waverley Planning Committee

In a truly shocking revelation, we have discovered that Waverley is proposing to slash Cranleigh’s representation on the committee that decides all the big housing applications from four voting Cranleigh Councillors to just ONE to represent the whole of Cranleigh Village.

The only reason we can see for reducing Cranleigh’s representation by so much is so that Waverley can dump even more houses here.

We are calling a PUBLIC MEETING – THURSDAY  25th May 2017 at 7pm in the Village Hall for you to Have Your Say!

It is disgraceful that a council can act like this and treat residents with such contempt. They are relying on the apathy of Cranleigh residents to help them achieve their goal. Cranleigh has already seen a disproportionate and unfair number of planning permissions granted totalling 1,300 so far.

Waverley has allocated 1,520 here in the village in the first part of its local plan and is planning to dump 45% of its ENTIRE housing allocation, that’s 4,455 in and around Cranleigh.

Waverley Borough Housing Allocation June 2016

THIS IS NOT PLANNING; IT IS MADNESS!

Now it seems that the Waverley Conservative Leadership want to stack the Joint Planning Committee in their favour, with people that don’t give a damn about what happens to Cranleigh, as long as it’s not in their backyard, making it much easier to dump even more houses here.

Cranleigh Village Meeting

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH! We are calling a public meeting in Cranleigh on:

THURSDAY  25th May 2017  at 7pm in the Village Hall

and we are inviting our 5 borough councillors. We want to ask them what they are doing to represent our views, and what they are doing for Cranleigh residents. We will also be asking you if you want to call for a vote of “No confidence” in the leadership of Waverley Borough Council.

We have heard that people living in other parts of the borough are laughing at us. “Why is Cranleigh not up in arms?” they say, “why aren’t they shouting in the street?” and “why are they accepting this housing dump without any fuss?”. They think you don’t care, and basically, they think Waverley can, and will do, whatever it wants in Cranleigh with absolutely no backlash.

It is time to shake off any apathy and stand up to be counted. Are you going to let them wreck Cranleigh completely?

This is the last opportunity to hold the Conservative Waverley leadership –“we can do whatever we like to Cranleigh” – to account and really show them what the people of Cranleigh think about their secret plans to expand Cranleigh into a major town in Waverley.

More to come…..

And don’t believe you have seen the end of huge planning applications in Cranleigh, Waverley want our Neighbourhood Plan Group, as you will see from Item 5 on the Parish Council Agenda for 20th April to find even more housing sites, employment sites, community sites and retail sites in and around the village. So, if you live near a green field and are breathing a sigh of relief because you think you’re safe, think again. You could soon have a huge housing estate, or industrial units next to you. If we do nothing, this will only be the beginning……………….

Join us in the Village Hall at 7pm on Thursday 25th May. Invite your family, neighbours and friends, because Cranleigh people are not going down without a fight!

WE WILL BE HEARD

Tell us what you think by adding your comments below.

Find out about worrying changes for Stroke patients in Waverley

Find out about worrying changes for Stroke patients in Waverley

Press release from Cranleigh Patients’ Participation Group (PPG) – 18 April 2017

On Saturday 22 April in Village Way, outside the Co-op food store between 10 am and 12.30 members of Cranleigh Patients’ Participation Group (PPG) will be explaining their worries about the proposed changes to provision for stroke patients in Waverley and asking local residents to complete the consultation on the plans.

Members of the PPG will also ask residents to sign their petition to the CCG and NHS England to make sure the worries in the villages is heard loud and clear.

In brief, the proposals are that patients from Cranleigh suspected of having a stroke be taken to Frimley Hospital to the new hyper acute unit there. After stabilisation, they would then be sent to Farnham Hospital or Woking for further rehabilitation or sent directly home under “early supported discharge”.

The Cranleigh Patients’ Group is recommending to all Cranleigh Patients to call for

  • Excellent & reliable rapid access to the hyper-acute stroke unit in Frimley Park Hospital
  • In–hospital rehabilitation in an acute stroke unit in Royal County Hospital Guildford, accessible to Cranleigh & Ewhurst patients &their families
  • A first-class network of specialist stroke rehabilitation physiotherapists, speech & occupational therapists based nearby to support stroke patients after discharge from hospital

It must be emphasised that the PPG fully supported the need to create hyper-acute specialised units and they stress to that those are the best places to treat stroke patients in the first instance.

ENDS

DETAILS OF THE CONSULTATION
The online consultation on the Guildford and Waverley Clinical Commissioning Group website closes on 30 April

http://www.guildfordandwaverleyccg.nhs.uk/page1.aspx?p=20

For further information contact Lynda MacDermott
Chair – Cranleigh Patients’ Participation Group
07779251890

 

 The PPG’s Concerns

The PPG has deep concerns about the safety of the wider proposals put forward for patients who live in rural Waverley for a variety of reasons. The main ones are the following:-

  1. An inadequate ambulance service.
    SECAM, the present emergency ambulance provider, has recently been assessed by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) as “inadequate” both for the times it takes to reach patients and the training and retention of skilled paramedic staff.
  2. The traffic congestion between Cranleigh, Guildford and Frimley is extreme and even in off peak times the time to reach the proposed hospitals will be critical

Cranleigh to Frimley Park hospital = 23.3 miles
Cranleigh – RSCH = 11miles

  1. It is very difficult, nigh on impossible, to reach either Farnham or Woking by public transport for family and friends to visit and support family members who have had a stroke and need that extra emotional support. Both are 17 miles away from Cranleigh.
  2. There is a lack of stroke specialised physiotherapists and speech and language therapists in the community to support patients who are sent home, especially if that is only after 3 days in the hyper-acute unit without step down time.

 

Beryl Harvey Field working party this Sunday 9th April, 10-12am

Beryl Harvey Field working party this Sunday 9th April, 10-12am

This Sunday 9th April (10-12am) there is another working party at the Beryl Harvey Conservation Field. This is a really worthwhile cause and a good excuse to get out in the fresh air this weekend.  The field is located next to the football fields and the allotments. Children are welcome, but sorry no dogs are allowed.

See the note below from Julia Reed, who is organising the working party.

Hi Everyone

Just a quick reminder that we have our usual monthly task at BHF this Sunday 9th April. The woodland flowers are beginning to look lovely, with wood anemones, celandine, primroses and the bluebells are starting to flower in the woods, but not showing any colour yet in the field.

There is an incredible difference between the fenced patches of field and the grass & flowers in the rest of the field, showing how much damage the rabbits do, particularly to certain plants, so this task we are going to try and fence some more areas to see what flowers we can encourage . The cowslips are particularly suffering & we already know that Ox Eye daisies have failed to establish due to rabbits.

We are also going to fence around the new willow tunnel,  started last month , as the rabbits have started on that. Alongside the  usual tasks we will also try & get through the brambles to clear around the entrance to the artificial badger sett, which was constructed using spoil from the pond,  to see if we can encourage use of that . A new artificial sett has just been created on the Berkeley homes site as they discovered one ( not currently in use) in the woodland they have sadly cleared.

We also had a lot of frogspawn in the pond this year and a moorhen is nesting again.

Theo of NaturdayZ  made a successful presentation to the Parish Council in March & we have had preliminary discussions this evening about the possibility of having an open day at the field, with him offering some activities, to publicise the field and encourage it’s use by the local community including local children. He will then hopefully offer a monthly activity morning to local children. It would be wonderful to see more children learning about nature and enjoying being outside and making good use of the field.

Best wishes,

Julia.

Poo Brook still not resolved

Poo Brook still not resolved

Adrian Clarke of Cranleigh Civic Society and Cranleigh Borough Councillor Liz Townsend were interviewed by Surrey Radio this week about the severe pollution problems in the brook that flows out of a culvert behind Marks and Spencer’s car park.  The brook problem is also featured on the front page of the current edition of the Surrey Advertiser (Friday 31 March 2017).

Residents have been complaining to Thames Water about raw sewage in the brook for 8 years, and in 2015 Cranleigh Civic Society took samples from the brook and got an independent laboratory to test them.  The report, which showed very high levels of e coli, was sent to the Environment Agency who investigated it and immediately put it onto their ‘UK Priority Hot Spot List’.

Cranleigh Civic Society also tried unsuccessfully to get Waverley Borough Council’s Environmental Health Department to help to get this serious pollution issue resolved.  We suspect that the reason why Waverley did not want to get involved is because it would jeopardise their hugely unpopular draft local plan.  In case you didn’t know this, Waverley wants to dump 44% of its new housing allocation into the Cranleigh area.  The same Waverley we all have to pay our very high Council Tax charges to.

Since the Environment Agency got involved, Thames Water has been carrying out tests, putting dyes in outflows and feeding cables with cameras from the culvert back towards the High Street, but with mixed results.  Thames Water claims to have discovered several ‘misconnections’ over the last year, but they have been very secretive about the number and locations of these.  Misconnections are where a house or a commercial property illegally connects its foul drainage to rainwater pipes either intentionally, or by mistake.

An engineer from Thames Water told us that, over the weekend of  1-2 April 2017, his team had identified eight commercial properties in the High Street that had misconnections; an amazing admission considering that Thames Water have had crews out investigating this problem now on several occasions over the last two years!

The cost of all these investigations so far is huge, the Thames Water engineer told us, and that, as it is unfair to burden their customers with this cost, Thames Water will be seeking to recover the cost from the commercial premises in the High Street.

We are hoping that Thames Water will now issue 21-day notices to the offending premises in the High Street to correct their problems.  If the businesses ignore the 21 day notice, they can face large penalties.

Why is all this a problem?  Children were seen last summer playing in the brook building a dam, and they often retrieve footballs from the brook when playing on the adjacent field, and people walk their dogs next to the brook (and dogs like to jump into water).  Also, the brook joins Cranleigh Waters, a stream that is already heavily polluted and which has caused fish stocks to die out in Bramley.

We will keep you informed of any updates on this story.